SC10 BOF: Developing, Recruiting, and Retaining Women in HPC

ABSTRACT: Despite the fact that women comprise more than half the world's
population, they are underrepresented as a group in high-performance
computing. In this BOF, we will discuss how the HPC community can
improve the representation of women.

We will begin with a
discussion of the challenges faced in attracting women into the HPC
field, and develop some ideas that can be implemented to improve
recruitment and retention of women along the educational pipeline and in
entry-level positions. Then, we will discuss the challenges in
retaining women in HPC careers, including challenges unique to the
field, and examine the practices of organizations that have been
successful in recruitment and retention, with an eye toward how HPC
organizations can incorporate these practices into their corporate
culture in order to retain employees of all types.

The session
will begin with the perspectives of women in successful careers on the
academic, industrial, and laboratory sides of high-performance
computing, and continue with an open discussion among the BOF
attendees. In this session, we hope to foster a community to aid in the
development, recruitment, and retention of women in HPC.

Nan Boden, President and Chief Executive Officer at Myricom, grew up in the Huntsville, Alabama area. She earned her BS degree from the University of Alabama (Tuscaloosa) in Applied Mathematics, and her MS and PhD degrees in Computer Science from the Computer Science graduate program at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).

In 1994 Nan helped found Myricom, a startup with the mission to commercialize high-performance interconnect technology originally developed at Caltech. Nan's PhD research in Runtime systems for fine-grain multicomputers led directly into her work at Myricom, where she wrote the earliest version of the software that controlled the company's first products.

During her sixteen years with Myricom, Nan has served in several sales and operations positions within the company, including Executive Vice President and CFO. Nan has been a member of the Myricom Board of Directors since 2001. In 2010, Nan was named President and Chief Executive Officer.

She is presently pursuing her MBA degree at UCLA's Anderson School of Management (degree expected summer 2011).

Lois Curfman McInnes

Lois Curfman McInnes is a Computational Scientist in the Mathematics and Computer Science Division of Argonne National Laboratory. She received a B.S. (summa cum laude) in mathematics and physics from Muhlenberg College. She received a Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from the University of Virginia in 1993 (advisor James M. Ortega). Her research focuses on numerical algorithms and software for the parallel solution of large-scale scientific applications involving nonlinear partial differential equations and related optimization problems. In particular, she develops such software tools within the PETSc and TAO libraries. Both libraries are used in a broad range of high-performance applications, and PETSc received a R&D100 Award in 2009.

Lois enjoys collaborating with a variety of multidisciplinary teams on large-scale computational science research. She is a member of the Towards Optimal Petascale Simulations (TOPS), Framework Application for Core-Edge Transport Simulations (FACETS), and Community Petascale Project for Accelerator Science and Simulation (ComPASS) projects funded by the Department of Energy’s Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing (SciDAC). She leads research on nonlinear solvers in FACETS and coordinates math/cs research in ComPASS. Also, she is PI of a newly established SciDAC-e project to develop algorithms and software for large-scale differential variational inequalities for heterogeneous materials, which is a partnership with the Center for Materials Science of Nuclear Fuel, a DOE Energy Frontier Research Center.

Dr. Patricia Teller

Patricia Teller is a professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP). She received her B.A. (magna cum laude), M.S., and Ph.D. (1991) from New York University (NYU). Her Ph.D. advisors were Drs. Allan Gottlieb and Ralph Grishman. While working on her dissertation, which is entitled "Translation-Lookaside Buffer Consistency in Highly-Parallel Shared-Memory Multiprocessors," she was a research scientist at NYU's Ultracomputer Research Lab and a visiting scientist at IBM, T.J. Watson Research Center, where she had previously worked with IBM's RP3 research group. Before joining UTEP in 1997, Prof. Teller was a faculty member at New Mexico State University (NMSU).

Dr. Teller's research interests include dynamic adaption of applications, operating systems, runtime systems, and computer architectures; performance evaluation, modeling, and enhancements; workload characterization; parallel and distributed computing; and computer architecture, emerging technologies, and operating systems. Over the past 16 years she has authored or co-authored more than 85 papers and been awarded over $6.6M of research funds from ARL, DARPA, DoD, DoE, NASA, NSF, IBM, and Intel.

At UTEP she has worked towards the establishment of UTEP's High-Performance Computing infrastructure (with approximately $2M in awards), and worked towards the education, retention, and advancement of students, particularly those from underrepresented populations (with approximately $2.5M in awards). For teaching excellence, she was named a CETaL (Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning) Fellow, and she has involved many undergraduate and graduate students in research, including some now working at Google, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, Intel, Microsoft, and the San Diego Supercomputing Center.

Prof. Teller served as General Chair of SC08 in Austin, Texas. In addition, she has served as an SC program committee member numerous times and has been financial, tutorial, student volunteer, and poster chair for major conferences. Currently she is a member of the Steering Committee for the Supercomputing Conference series. In addition, Dr. Teller has served as an NSF and DOE reviewer, and NSF review panel member, and a reviewer for many different publications and conferences. She has been invited to speak at various workshops, conferences, universities, and industrial centers; and she is a member of ACM, IEEE, Phi Beta Kappa, and an honorary member of the Golden Key National Honor Society. Finally, Teller is an advocate of diversity and outreach; as such, she was the elected chair (2004-2005) of the Coalition to Diversity Computing (CDC), and is now a member of the CDC's Leadership Team. In addition, Dr. Patricia Teller is an Associate Member of SPEC HPG and SPEC OSG.

Comments

"At institutions where there is child care
on site, where it is subsidized, where there are enough places for
assistant professors to have their children, women do well.

And
at institutions where it is assumed that you will make your own
arrangements, women do less well. There is good data on this. We need
institutional commitment."